Now we all know that Jesus ws betrayed for 30 pieces of silver.
But how much money ws that? What would it have bought? Was it a huge amount?
What would it’s modern value be?
Any ideas?
It apparently was enough to buy a soon-to-be graveyard.
And the latter question can be asked in two ways, are you looking for a “silver coin to dollars” answer or a “what is the price of that much silver in dollars” answer? The first answer is, well, unanswerable. Aside from the matter of records, its simply not comparable.
G’day
Your question is very difficult to answer, partly because there is considerable ambiguity about what it means.
I don’t have a good source for prices in the First Century to hand, but I do have figures from a price-fixing degree from AD 301 handy. And it has a note on it saying “Prices inflated by about a factor of fifty since the First Century”. On that basis, and if we assume that the ‘pieces of silver’ were denarii (a Biblical scholar might set us straight if they are not), Judas blood-money might have bought about:
60 kg of butcher’s meat
126 litres of wheat or lentils
210 litres of barley
3 saddles
15 pairs of boots
A farm labourer might have been paid 1/2 a denarius per day (and recieved board and lodging).
To my way of thinking that answers your question as best it can be done.
Regards,
Agback
Our minister reads a program that states it was less than the price of a beast of burden at the time.
Not so fast smiling bandit, it’s certainly answerable: just ask around how many dollars it would take to betray your messiah 
Seriously, we would need to know two different things. First, we’d need to know if “pieces of silver” were a fairly uniform currency. I believe the Romans were actually minting coins at this point, but I don’t know anything about the biblical pieces of silver. But even if they weren’t “coins” per se, as long as they had some kind of relatively universal value to people, then we’ve got something to work from.
Second, we’d need to look for the cost, in pieces of silver, of goods and services that have remained fairly constant in value over the past two millennia. The best bet would be highly labor intensive services, such as maybe what you would pay someone to clean your house. With a giant grain of salt, we could then guesstimate what a piece of silver was worth then, and what that would be in current American dollars.
All of this requires substantial detective work, which I can’t really do right now at the office 
On preview, Agback has already got a pretty good list already. I think your best bet for conversion to modern dollars is the value of one day’s worth of farm labor, after adjusting for the value of room and board.
The traditional definition of a denarius I have read often is indeed a day’s farm wages. So Judas’ price would be about a month’s worth of farm labor with room and board, or two, if we use Agback’s retro-calculation from Diocletian’s time. IF they were referring to Roman-standard denarii.
OTOH, they could be Greek-standard tetradrachma, which were also “pieces of silver” in very widespread general circulation, worth a little over 4 times more . Still… at most 9, at worst 1 month’s worth of a menial laborer’s salary+bunking+meals, for dropping the dime on one of your buds.
Thanks for that. One reason I am asking is that the value of the payment makes a difference as to motive.
If 30 pieces was a hell of a lot of money - ie something like a lottery win, then the motive could be greed, however, if it was a smallish amount of money then it wasn’t done for monetary gain.
Silver isn’t worth much now is it?
according to the footnotes in my KJV Bible, it was about $10, but who’s to say whether it was $10 in the fifties (when my mom was growing up)? if it was in the fifties, it was about twenty hot fudge sundaes!
A quick glance at the newspaper shows that it trades for about $4.50 an ounce, not much money. A “piece” of silver would maybe be about one ounce or so, I think. BUT, you’ve gotta remember, currency or whatever you use as a medium of trade doesn’t have to be inherently valuable at all; after all, there is nothing at all backing the U.S. Dollar, just the fact that we value them.
So far, it looks to me like a range between 1 and 9 months’ worth of menial farm labor is potentially worth “30 pieces of silver.” With great care and a giant pillar of salt, I’d maybe estimate the modern day value of such labor at between, I dunno, one and twelve thousand dollars? Probably less than $15,000. Not an insubstantial sum, but not enough to make someone turn in (effectively killing) someone they cared about. Sort of like breaking a car window because someone left a fiver on the front seat…
But, of course, I’m just shooting from the hip here on the modern dollar value of farm labor in the first century…